The history of thought is the history of its models. (Frederic Jameson,
The Prison-House of Language)

PhilWeb is devoted
to exploring the many, varied and often opposed attempts by human beings to
conceptualise the nature of 'things.' It is concerned, as such, with
nothing less than the history of as well as the cultural and topical diversity of
'thought.' That there has been much disagreement among those who have
offered such 'truth-claims' is, of course, something of an understatement:
intellectuals are deeply divided by fundamentally very different assumptions
concerning the nature of reality, the nature
of thought (to wit, the precise way in which knowledge about the world is produced)
and, ultimately, the nature of the being responsible for such thoughts.
Many, perhaps most, of us are convinced of the exclusive rightness of our
own and dismissive of others' points of view. PhilWeb is an effort to
draw attention to the variety of cogent and compelling perspectives that
exist on almost any single issue and the difficulty in weaving our way
between the various claims upon our assent.

What is
'Philosophy'? What is Theory? Please click
here to reach Metaphilosophy /
Metatheory. For my attempt to distinguish between these and
related terms, please go here.

Richard Rorty's
claim that contemporary philosophy
is divided into three major,
competing paradigms -- the "Husserlian (or ‘scientistic’)
answer, the Heideggerian (or ‘poetic’) answer and the pragmatist (or
‘political’) answer" ("Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor and as
Politics" 9) -- offers a persuasive explanation of the existence of such
disagreements. For positivists (whether in the natural or social
sciences), Rorty argues,
thought is synonymous with a universal reason which functions ideally
according to certain logical principles irrespective of the thinker in
question and his / her socio-historical location. On this view, accurate
knowledge of the world is produced through the careful application of the scientific method
(in a manner paradigmatic of the
production of objective knowledge in all spheres) and communicated via the
more or less transparent medium of language. For others, however,
thought is unable to resist the impress of social and political forces and
inevitably shaped by the very rhetoric, necessitated by this context, in
which it is couched. The result is that truth-claims are always
already relative to the person making the claim, the communicative medium
employed, and the context in which it is articulated. It is this fracture between the scientistic,
on the one hand, and the discursive, on the other, which
constitutes, in my view, the fundamental intellectual fault-line.

Distinguishing between philosophy (the
general philosophical quest to grasp how we make sense of reality) and Philosophy
(the scientistic conception of the field which currently prevails
especially in
Anglo-American philosophical circles), Rorty uses the term 'Theory' to
designate an approach to philosophy that acknowledges the historicist
and rhetorical dimensions of thought (emphases which are in some
quarters today subsumed under the rubric 'discursive'):

I shall use
the word ‘theorist’ rather than ‘philosopher’ because the etymology of
‘theory’ gives me the connotation I want, and avoids some I do not want.
The people I shall be discussing do not think that there is something
called ‘wisdom’ in any sense of the term which Plato would have
recognised. So the term ‘lover of wisdom’ seems inappropriate.
But theoria suggests taking a view of a large stretch of
territory from a considerable distance, and this is just what the people
I shall be discussing do. They all specialise in standing back
from, and taking a large view of, what Heidegger called the ‘tradition of
Western metaphysics’ – what I have been calling the ‘Plato-Kant canon.’
(Contingency, Irony, Solidarity 96)

I have accordingly reserved the term philosophy for the general philosophical quest to
grasp how we make sense of reality (hence the name of this website, namely PhilWeb),
the term Philosophy to denote the
dominant logico-scientistic approach, and the term Theory(or
sometimes 'literary' or 'critical' or 'cultural' or 'social theory'), to denote the
discursive dimensions of thought and, thus, of the production of knowledge
in a variety of spheres (e.g. the social 'sciences,' the natural sciences,
etc.).

To these
ends, PhilWeb aims to make available to researchers a variety
of resources, both 'off-line' (in the form, for example, of detailled bibliographies,
definitions and surveys of particular theorists, movements, periods, regions
and topics) and 'on-line' (in the form of links to relevant URLs
on the world wide web).

Of course, PhilWeb is a massive undertaking and, as such, will
always be a work in progress. For this reason, individual pages will necessarily be found at varying stages of completion.
Needless to say, moreover, it is due to the always changing nature of the
internet that users may find that some links go 'dead.' Please report
any such links which you may find to the email address given
at the foot of this page and we will do our best at this end to keep the
site up to date.

ORGANISATION

This
contents of this website (listed
to the left) is divided into three broad sections. The first section seeks to trace the
History of philosophy and is divided into
several periods (e.g. the Early Modern); the second section seeks to explore the various forms which philosophy take in different
Regions (e.g. the Caribbean); and the third section addresses
the main topics, problems or issues (e.g.
the self) which
thinkers have addressed.

For insights into the structure and nomenclature of particular pages,
please click here.